Soul aslyum seekers

Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Steven Knight delve deep into the dark underbelly of London life. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Okwe, a Nigerian illegal immigrant who drives a minicab by day and mans the reception desk of a seedy hotel at night; Senay (Audrey Tautou) is a Turkish girl cleaning at the same hotel - covertly, as she has applied for asylum and cannot work while her application is processed.

These two have the touchy, difficult relationship of a mutual attraction crowded out by survival priorities, but when Okwe discovers the hotel's drunken èminence grise, Sneaky (Sergi Lopez), is engaged in organ trafficking, their lives become more complicated and more closely linked.

Tautou is sweetly vulnerable and the two men are superb in tricky roles: Sneaky is a parody of evil, knocking back whisky miniatures while planning his next dastardly deed, but Lopez keeps him human: the combination of cockiness and booze suggests a heart pumping beneath the fatty capitalist tissue. Ejiofor, intensely watchable from the moment we first see him hustling for business, gives Okwe tunnel vision rather than a halo: here is the man of virtue, good at chess but bad at life, struggling to give up the hope that life will turn out to resemble a board game after all. It's a fascinating, difficult film. Frears uses romance to lighten the tone without detracting from the horrors - mundane or extraordinary - that menace it.

Dirty Pretty Things
Cert: 15